TV Sales Rise 15% After Samsung, Sony Cut Prices on New Models

Television sales increased by 15 percent worldwide in the fourth quarter as manufacturers led by Samsung Electronics Co. slashed prices on new technologies to draw holiday shoppers.

Samsung, based in Suwon, South Korea, led with 21 percent of the market, researcher DisplaySearch said today in a statement. Tokyo-based Sony Corp. was second and LG Electronics Inc., based in Seoul, was third.

Brands and retailers did a better job of anticipating demand, DisplaySearch said. Energy-efficient light-emitting diode sets accounted for 30 percent of shipments after prices fell. 3-D capable sets, which have struggled to attract buyers, made up about 9 percent of industry revenue.

For all of 2010, Samsung captured 22 percent of TV sales, followed by LG with 14 percent, Sony with 12 percent, Panasonic with 8.2 percent and Sharp with 7.1 percent.

In North America, where manufacturers said a price war crimped profits, Samsung captured 28 percent of revenue, versus Sony’s 14 percent and Irvine, California-based Vizio Inc.’s 13 percent.

To contact the reporter on this story: Cliff Edwards in San Francisco at cedwards28@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Anthony Palazzo at apalazzo@bloomberg.net

source. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-22/tv-sales-rise-15-after-samsung-sony-cut-prices-on-new-models.html

Mobile payments: Beyond Google and Apple

February 21, 2011, 04:13 PM —

With the recent announcements last week that Apple and Google each are launching content subscription services, it's easy to forget that there are other players in the mobile payments arena.

One of them is an alliance of almost 800 carriers working to develop a standardized mobile-payments system based on Near Field Communications Technology, which allows customer data to be transferred by swiping a smartphone at an NFC payment terminal.

(Also see: Google outmaneuvers Apple in content subscription play)

Mobiledia reports that the GSM Association (GSMA), founded in the mid-'90s, hopes to launch NFC services in "select markets" next year.

GSMA said it will develop mobile payment standards to ensure worldwide interoperability, so users can use their phone to buy goods around the world, regardless of operator network or device type.

The mobile payments market could hit $1.1 trillion by 2014, IE Market Research says, with a third of that total being comprised of NFC transactions. While IE says only 8 percent of Americans have paid for an item with their smartphone, mobile payments are much more common in at least 15 other countries, including Taiwan, where 32 percent of that nation's consumers have paid for something using their cell phones, followed by South Korea (29 percent) and Singapore (21 percent).

Members of the GSMA include Deutsche Telekom, Europe's largest phone company, Vodafone, France Telekom and China Unicom.

U.S.-based carriers also are racing to roll out NFC services. Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T-Mobile USA in November announced a joint project called ISIS, with hopes of offering an NFC service next year.

Chris Nerney writes about the business side of technology market strategies and trends, legal issues, leadership changes, mergers, venture capital, IPOs and technology stocks. Follow him on Twitter @ChrisNerney.

source. http://www.itworld.com/mobile-wireless/137754/mobile-payments-beyond-google-and-apple

These days most modern browsers have solved

These days most modern browsers have solved most of these quirks in CSS rendering and this has made many different CSS layouts possible. However, some people continue to use old browsers, and designers need to keep this in mind, and allow for graceful degrading of pages in older browsers. Most notable among these old browsers is Internet Explorer 6, which is viewed in the web design community as becoming the new Netscape Navigator 4 — a block that holds the World Wide Web back from converting to CSS design. However, the W3 Consortium has made CSS in combination with XHTML the standard for web design.

Website Maintenance

website creator

Spammers could harvest gmail addresses by editing "username.googlepages.com" to "username@gmail.com". Perhaps to address this vulnerability to spammers, Google allowed the user to "Create another site", which would be a new address within the googlepages.com domain. To avoid spammers, one could create a new site and hide the default site, which contains one's gmail username.[citation needed]

Lacking the ability to link to external CSS means in-page CSS had to be utilized, and such style code could not change the basic structure of the templates. Some critics had claimed that the templates and limited customization would lead to similar problems (such as large numbers of sites with uninteresting, 'identikit' designs) as were experienced by the GeoCities service in the late 1990s.[1] An earlier criticism that Google's own Adsense program and similar services were not available in the Page Creator and required a hack to work. It had been addressed by the ability to include JavaScript in Page Creator.[citation needed]

Google launched a product called Google Sites in February 2008 and had stopped accepting new sign-ups for Page Creator. Google's About Google Page Creator page states that: "If you are currently a Page Creator user, you can continue to use Page Creator and your pages will automatically be transitioned to Google Sites later this year."[2]

Google Sites has fewer templates than Page Creator. Another disadvantage is that Google Sites does not allow importing an independently created HTML file. Google has also not explained whether the transition to Google Sites will include transition of any presence in the Google index of Googlepages sites.[citation needed]